New Channels, New Challenges
Today, technology plays a huge role in the development and distribution of entertainment content. Marketing professionals must not only understand how to manipulate the available platforms; they must also be keenly aware of what technology might come next. Each new step brings scads of disbelievers—Twitter will never amount to anything—who may be right about the ability of the product to generate revenue, but deaf, dumb, and blind to the importance of a particular channel in acting as a conduit of influence. (To that point, Twitter-fed griping about the 2012 Olympics actually caused more people to tune into NBC’s broadcast of the events.)5
Let’s take a moment to ponder technology platforms in the twenty-first century, if only to understand how fast a new one might arrive.